Page 81 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

A genealogy data services platform implemented with

linked data technologies ①a

1
①b 1*
2
XIA Cuijuan , LIU Wei , CHEN Tao & ZHANG Lei 1
1 Shanghai Library, Shanghai 200031, China
2 Shanghai Information Center for Life Science, Shanghai 200031, China

Abstract
Open data becomes not only the responsibility but also a development opportunity for the government,
scientific research institutions, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. The Shanghai Library,
starting from the genealogical data, has been dedicated to constructing the historical documents and
data services platform through reorganizing its traditional resources by utilizing the Linked Open Data
technologies. The genealogy data services platform, through BIBFRAME-based ontology design,
data transformation from RDB to RDF, system design on the basis of the four principles of Linked
Data as well as the system development based on the framework of semantic technologies, supports
bibliographic control in the Internet environment and satisfies general users’ needs for tracing their
family roots, and professional researchers’ demands for data mining.

Keywords
Genealogy, Data service, Linked data, Open data

0 Introduction

Open data has been a new trend during the Internet development. Data as a vital resource has
reached a consensus worldwide. Governments and public institutions, holding the most public
data, have stood at the vanguard of the open data movement (Wu, 2015). In 2009, Data.gov
officially launched in the United States, driving the data open movement, and followed by
Data. gov.au of Australia and Data. gov.uk of the United Kingdom. In November 2010, the “EU
Commission’s Open Data Strategy” was first proposed by the European Commission and put the
data open movement to its heyday (Attard, Orlandi, Scerri, & Auer, 2015). Media including The
New York Times, and the BBC successfully implemented the strategy and the library community
was the active advocate of the data open movement. National libraries of Sweden, the United
States, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, South Korea, Japan and other countries
around the globe as well as OCLC published their bibliographic data or standard data in the
form of linked data. The Library of Congress also took the lead to carry out the liked data of

①a This article is an outcome of the youth project “The Application of W3C’s RDB2RDF Standards in Building Linked Data
Services” (No.13CTQ008) supported by National Social Science Foundation of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to XIA Cuijuan, Email: cjxia@libnet.sh.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-1859-6979